This post has absolutely nothing to do with 3D (but it is unbelievable)

In honor of this monumental week 3Dwalkthroughs.com thought we would share an unbelievable 1,474 megapixel image that was taken during the inauguration. The image when pulled back shows almost all the people that were in attendance during the ceremony. The amazing occurs when you start to zoom in. Click here>> to see it.

Using the controls, pick a spot and start to zoom in on the image. No matter where you zoom you can see each persons face as if a close up picture was taken. When I think about the ramifications of this it is both compelling and a little scary.

Here is how it was done, told by the photographer David Bergen.
I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Source: David Bergmen blog